Originally Posted by
jifop
hey genghis! basically we are tennents at the old qinetiq site so I'm trying to get some pictures and info about what happened there in the past!
thanks guys
Is that on the old airfield site, or the old wind tunnel site?
I worked circa 1991 on the tunnel site and can dig out some old notes, although I'd never done much more than visit the airfield once in a while.
My main work there was in the large supersonic wind tunnel, from memory it was 8ftx8ft in section, with a total volume of 450,000ft^3. We could run it up to M=3.5, although not at that large test section which would be reduced down a bit. The power consumption of that tunnel was quite high - in the order of 70MW, but it was an exceptional facility, albeit clearly very expensive to run. To avoid mashing up the instrumentation with the shock wave as we ran up, we'd normally suck air out down to around 5psi, then bring it up to the required Mach number (M, fraction of the speed of sound), then slowly re-introduce pressure until we got the right Reynolds number (a measure of scale used to match wind tunnel results to real aeroplanes) then we'd start moving the model about remotely to get the test results. The tunnel also had a pretty impressive video-Schlieren photography system, which allowed us to watch the shock waves on video monitors in the control room, which usually had about half a dozen of us in there (of which I was by far the most junior!) running the tunnel and model.
I worked there mostly on the testing of what is now called Eurofighter Typhoon, which we had in there up to around M=2.2 in a 1/18th scale model, which itself had cost around £1m to manufacture I was told. We spent many happy days testing it at various speeds and configurations, with holes left by various changes being smoothed off with enormous amounts of dental plaster.
I think that we had two other main wind tunnels on the site - a small transonic tunnel which had a similar power consumption and had originally been looted from the German rocket site at Peenemunde, and a vertical wind tunnel (now being used as some form of indoor skydiving facility I think) which was used for spinning tests. I don't recall his name, but there was a legendary technician there who could reputedly "throw" a free flying model aircraft into that tunnel achieving just about any spin mode you wanted.
I think that the whole thing, up to then proudly RAE, got subsumed into the new DRA organisation (which then became DERA and finally Qinetiq) circa 1992. The last superintendent of RAE Bedford was a chap called L.Owen Hudson who I think is still around but retired somewhere near Boscombe Down; I knew him reasonably well for a time (he was also probably the best Engineer I've ever worked for) and recall him being very distressed at having to give the order to remove the RAE crest from all the notice boards.
I'll dig through my old notes and see what else I can find (and check my facts are right!)
G